“Are you my mother?” I read that book to my kids when they were young. It was written back in 1960 about a little bird looking for its mother. It was difficult reading the book to my daughters when my first wife and I separated. They wanted both their parents and I wanted time with them. I’ve thought back on this book since my own mother’s death, and in light of recent images of motherhood.

On the biological level, motherhood is pretty straight forward. It is the social constructs around motherhood that are challenging. The mother is a source of comfort and protection. We talk about things being as American as motherhood and apple pie. Others speak about the motherland and there are books like “Are you my mother?”

Then, there is the traditional black spiritual, “Motherless Child” where the absence of a mother is intermingled with the absence of freedom for slaves.

Yet it is the recent Old Spice commercial for body spray that has prompted my latest thinking about the social construct of motherhood. Friends have described the mothers spying on their sons as they start out on their dating lives as creepy or funny. It provided an interesting opportunity to think more about my relationship to my own mother.

I remember being in seventh grade and going to the Junior High School dance. I was shy and awkward and managed to ask a girl to dance a few times, but mostly stood on the north side of the gym where the guys stood, not managing to build up the courage to cross the dance floor to the south side of the gym where the girls stood with their own shy, awkward nervousness.

Afterwards. my mother picked me up in the old green Chevy pickup truck. She drove out of the parking lot and as we made our way home she asked me how was the dance. I didn’t want to reveal my moments of nervousness, disappointment or elation and simply muttered, “Okay.”

There was silence in the car as she continued to drive home. Finally, her curiosity led her to ask who I danced with. I mentioned a few different names of girls that I knew she was acquainted with and would approve of, but didn’t mention the name of my secret crush.

I was embarrassed and didn’t want to talk about it. But at the same time, I was glad my mother was giving me a ride home, and was interested in what was going on in my life, especially during those awkward years of developing my own identity and growing away from my family.

I remember when my mom got me deodorant. I was embarrassed, but at the same time pleased that she had gotten it. Being an unaware preteen, I didn’t know about such things or my need for them.

Now, forty years later, I look back at those days. I can only imagine what it must be like to be a young boy in the twenty-first century. Yet I imagine those same feelings of embarrassment and gratitude a youth of today must feel when his mother gets him some body spray.

The other day, I noticed on the dining room table a small plastic bracelet loom my wife had picked up for our daughter. It made me think of the looms of my childhood. Some of which were in our garage from when my siblings and I cleaned out my mother’s house after her death. I made a coaster and introduced my daughter to weaving, passing on some of what I learned from my mother.